From the 'it's comic book wednesday' files:

As every geek knows, Wednesday is comic book day (the day that every comic book store in America gets new issues from Diamond, the only comic book distributor left..). This week though, we've got a new free online entry from a most unusual publisher, networking vendor Cisco with their title, 'The Realm."

The Realm is an online comic that animates the pane flow and adds voice narration. Creatively it's an engaging experience, not as complete as a full scale animation but more alive that just a flat 2D image.

The basic concept is that there are a few 'heroes' that are fighting a botnet of some sort. The head of the heroes is a Defender Jux - a bald Morpheus (Matrix) type and then there is 'Vixa' the buxom female hero. Defender Trace kind of reminds me (as drawn) of Daniel Jackson from Stargate and then we've got Defender Wall who is clearly the no-nonsense got in with the guns hot marine type.

The botnets are literally 'bots' (not quite Transformer Decepticons or Terminator T-888's but hey we'll see) that attack the defenders.

Yes the threats that face modern networks are very real. But since so much of it happens in the Ether(net) it's sometimes hard to personify.

A comic like The Realm may well serve to help people take a different view on security as a classic struggle between the forces of good (the superhero defenders) and the evil bots. I enjoyed the first episode personally and will watch the next one too.

Cisco has been involved with fighting 'robots' before too - for  a brief period Cisco sponsored a Terminator : The Sarah Connor Chronicles game called Evasion (that site is no longer live). I wonder if Cisco will have a play in the upcoming Terminator Salvation movie too, no doubt John Connor could use a little help fighting Skynet too.